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Donald Trump again issued a grave threat to destroy the “entire country” of Iran during a phone call with a Fox News reporter on Sunday.

The president told Fox’s Trey Yingst that for him, the “question” was “if and when” it would be required to “blow the entire nation up” if Iran’s government did not submit to his demands.

It’s at least the second time the president has directly threatened to target Iran for widespread carnage, presumably affecting civilians. U.S. forces have already been criticized for strikes that have hit civilian areas, including a girls’ school in Minab in February, which killed 120 schoolchildren.

It comes as the president is facing low polling on the war itself and is watching both his own popularity and the Republican Party’s sink as a result. A Fox News poll out this weekend found that 71 percent of Americans think that Trump lacks a plan to end the war altogether and new escalating conflicts between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi Arabia threaten to further disrupt the region.

“They better behave,” Yingst said the president told him of Iran’s government, adding that the choices included “wiping them out, letting Iran rot economically, or making a deal”.

Donald Trump once again threatened to destroy the entire country of Iran on Sunday (AP)

But the U.S. and Iran seem no closer to a deal now than the two countries did in in July, when a ceasefire between U.S. and Iranian forces dissolved under a hail of Iranian attacks against shipping vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, the conflict seems to have reignited fighting between Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi Arabian government, which is seeking to put an end to the years-long insurgency. U.S. and Houthi officials met one week ago in Oman to discuss the resumed hostilities, and affirmed that U.S. and neutral vessels would not be targeted by Houthi attacks as long as the U.S. remained on the sidelines.

A Houthi strike on Riyadh’s airport caused major flight disruptions Saturday (Reuters)

Trump’s polling on the Iran war is worryingly low for the president, and worse for Republicans running in the approaching midterm elections. In the Fox News poll published last week, six in 10 voters say the war was the wrong decision, in hindsight, compared with just over a third who still support the president’s choice. Among those who believe the president lacks a clear strategy for extracting the U.S. from the conflict is four in 10 Republicans and 83 percent of registered independents, according to the Fox poll.

The same survey found that more than four in 10 voters believe the long-term effects of the war will make the U.S. less safe, compared to 32 percent who say it will make the country safer.

The Trump administration’s stated reason for launching the strikes in February were to prohibit the reconstruction of Iran’s nuclear program, which the president said was “obliterated” in a previous round of strikes last summer and the administration has yet to prove was under redevelopment. The poll found that the war itself remains low on voters’ list of motivating factors ahead of the midterms though its related effects were not: Cost of living/inflation was the most-mentioned issue by poll respondents when asked about what was motivating their midterm vote. The economy and jobs were second.

Gas prices in the U.S. remain well north of $4 a gallon nationally, and fears of further conflict in and around the Strait of Hormuz have raised fears that prices will jump even higher before November.

Fuel prices in Great Neck, New York, with less than two months to go before voters hit the polls (Reuters)

Trump has said that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon at any cost. But voters do not seem convinced of the president’s explanation that Iran was close, or was attempting to resume efforts towards obtaining weaponizable nuclear material.

Six months into the Iran war, the costs of the conflict are mounting. Pentagon estimates indicate that the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars on the war already, even as the White House refuses to call it that — and U.S. stockpiles of critical defense munitions, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and interceptor systems like THAAD units are dwindling to critical levels, posing problems not just for the U.S. efforts in Iran but around the world, where U.S. allies, including Ukraine, are reliant on supplies of those weapons.

The president’s previous threat to attack the “entire” country of Iran came on the eve of U.S. and Iranian officials striking the now-dead ceasefire agreement in early April.

Donald Trump is depicted on a billboard in Tehran as hostilities continue between the two nations (Reuters)

At that time, Trump warned on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” His threats were taken by many of his critics as an admission that the U.S. government was considering targeting civilian areas, which would constitute war crimes.

Trump never followed through on that threat, and paused U.S. strikes on Iranian targets only hours later. In that same initial posting on Truth Social, the president wrote about how his administration was pursuing “regime change” in Iran, which his team has now reportedly largely abandoned as a goal and is only brought up by the president when he mentions the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, in late February.